South Sea Republic is the leading google search for Republican Doctrine . The second entry on that search links to the online opinion forum from an article on the same subject. The American Republican Party has one of the world's biggest, wealthiest and efficient party political war machines, and some upstart Australian website is gazumping them with respect to republican doctrine on teh internets .

I stated a while ago that ;

I would argue that the decentralised data networks will flatten the present system of status entirely, making us all equal, and wiser for it.

It certainly flattened traction between South Sea Republic and the American Republican Party when searching on "republican doctrine" in this instance. That is a good thing though, the American Republic Party are not very Republican, in fact, like most political parties, they are more authoritarian than anything else. The ghost of James Madison is desperately needed to haunt that party.

Umair Haque asks:

Let's revisit the spectre haunting venture capital. Why aren't there more Googles?

This is disingenuous. It is easy to forget that prior to google there were numerous search engines all vying for people's attention. I can recall changing from Alta Vista to Hotbot as the competing products got better and better. Google basically won on interface. In other words they didn't innovate so much, as improve an existing product.

This is the normal trajectory for a successful business. There is nothing unique about Google in that respect.

Haque continues:

The answer's very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically.

Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them.

Meh. Google's much vaunted market dominance and verbing has come because they have improved existing products. Online ads existed before google, I can recall doubleclick doing quite well in that market, well enough that they survived the crash and were recently bought by Google. Gmail, Calendar, etc etc, they are all improvements on existing products. This is the normal path for a successful company.

Haque's thesis is reliant on the internet community forgetting its own history. He may as well ask why aren't there more General Electrics?

From here:

If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren't bothering with that inconvenient "www" and ".com" and are just going straight through Google.

I do that. Apparently someone has already argued for the dropping of the .com on the internet. Not sure what that would leave for .org or .net sites.

From the article;

Here is a business [Yahoo] that has beaten Google in area after area, that is unquestionably the #1 media company on the net, and yet has let itself be defined by the one area in which it is #2 [Search] -- and where it could be much more profitable and successful by partnering [out-sourcing search] with #1 [Google] than by competing with them.

It is interesting that ISPs are also starting to tell customers to go and get a free email account from GMail or Hotmail instead of using an ISP email. The ISPs are too small and the bigger companies handle spam filtering and access much better.

Via cafeconleche a quote from Robert Cringley, "Bill Gates used to worry about Microsoft losing its monopoly overnight because of a technical mistake. We all laughed. We laughed because Microsoft had such financial and sales clout and had the executive suite of nearly every customer company so snowed that they seemed unassailable. But on some level Gates was correct and we've seen that proved by Google."

Which is a pretty lazy analogy. Microsoft still has its operating system monopoly. For all of Apple's success it has made very little inroads into the operating system market. Firefox is an outstanding product but it is no more than 20% of traffic on most sites.

Microsoft is still an operating system and office productivity behemoth. The only thing Google and Microsoft have in common is that they are big tech companies; but they are not in the same market. Google is an advertising reseller, while Microsoft actually sells bundled code into products. They are two different markets.

Microsoft has been trying to get into the search market with Yahoo!, but even there, it is more like Microsoft is buying Time-Warner as Yahoo! is a massive media company, not a search one.

Because Google got big so quickly it has gathered all sorts of mythical attributes in modern media. It was an innovative company, it re-created what we expect from search engines, but also managed to sustain that search functionality through a well executive advertising business model.

Then again mythos sells, in the same way that sensationalism and drama does. Lazy analogies will consistently be the domain of the writer who has to appeal to a mass audience.

Via dezeen, this G1 phone is based on Google's Android. It is manufactured by HTC and will be available through T-Mobile. Looks pretty nice and clean a design. Except.

Fold out keyboard. Ouch. The iPhone has the in-screen keyboard, so it has a nicer design, and doesn't require the complex mechanicals of a fold-out keyboard. For Android giving designers greater latitude and commoditizing the phone this one doesn't pass. It is just a phone that is not up to par with the iPhone.

The RKS Phone is a better design that uses the Android software.

The danger of monopolistic relationships. According to this the reason that Google Voice was pulled from Apple's App Store was:

Well, so much for my speculation. A reliable little birdie has informed me that it was indeed AT&T; that objected to Google Voice apps for the iPhone. It's that simple.

In the United States ATT bought an exclusive license from Apple to be the carrier for the iPhone. As much as I love my iPhone it means I am stuck with ATT. I used to be a Verizon customer as they have really good coverage and I traveled alot.

I don't have the same choice of carriers with the iPhone-ATT. It worked for ATT, they got me as a customer courtesy of it, I would rather than Apple had not gone that route though. My preferring it and Google potentially being upset are two different things though. Google is much bigger economically than I am.

I doubt Apple will do anything. They have been single-minded in the past.

I don't have the same patience in wading through all the spam related and domain based advertising spam that my wife has in hunting down a shopping deal online. I pretty much jump to a trusted e-retailer that I have done business with before - such as amazon, or a domain specific one - such as design by humans. An interesting comment by Chris Dixon and how this relates to the Google's business model:

Google's real business is selling ads for plane tickets, dvd players, and malpractice lawyers. Online advertising revenue is directly correlated with finding users who have purchasing intent. Google's true primary competitive threats are product-related sites, especially Amazon. As it gets harder to find a washing machine on Google, people will skip search and go directly to Amazon and other product-related sites.

That is true for sites like Amazon and Victoria Secret which have well developed websites with good search and search layout. Sites like Target and Lowes have horrific search results, which are impossible to whittle down and their results pages have tiny images, with un-descriptive text and no mechanism to view all or even to look at categories within that search. So you are led back to Google to try and make sense of their crappy search results. Oh the conundrum!